Ionic liquids future research issues

The potential improvements that ionic liquids may impart to conducting polymers have been widely discussed - increased doping levels, smoother films, increased conductivity, decreased over-oxidation and improved electrochemical stability and so on. However, the research to date in this area has only just begun to investigate these hypotheses and demonstrate any material advantages in the use of ionic liquids future directions in this area must focus on some of these issues in addition to simply demonstrating the use of new ionic liquids for conducting polymer synthesis. 

However, there is still a long way to go before ionic liquids become routinely used in biocatalysis. From today s perspective the following issues wiU have to be addressed in much more detail in future research. 

Thus, the question, whether ionic liquids (or at least the most common representatives among this enormous pool of compounds) can be viewed exclusively as baseline toxicants or whether there are some more specific effects and issues to look at beyond the side chain effect, needs to be answered for a prospective approach in ionic liquid toxicology. We think that the field of ionic liquid toxicology can only move forward if future research activities address more specific effects. To demonstrate the side chain effect again and again in more and more biological test systems simply consolidates the data already available, but cannot contribute substantially to the prospective design of inherently safer ionic liquids. 

In this concluding part, we would now like to summarise our key issues and point out what, from our point of view, needs to be done in future research to take a big step towards inherently safer and hence more sustainable ionic liquids. 

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